Oxford Lectures on Poetry

by A. C. Bradley

The king says that Hamlet,

being remiss, Most generous, and free from all contrivings, Will not peruse the foils.

The words ‘open and free’ apply no less eminently to Brutus, Lear, and Timon. Antony and Coriolanus are men naturally frank, liberal, and large. Prospero lost his dukedom through his trustfulness. Romeo and Troilus and Orlando, and many slighter characters, are so far of the same type. Now such a free and open nature, obviously, is specially exposed to the risks of deception, perfidy, and ingratitude. If it is also a nature sensitive and intense, but not particularly active or (if the word may be excused) volitional, such experiences will tempt it to melancholy, embitterment, anger, possibly even misanthropy. If it is thus active or volitional, it may become the prey of violent and destructive passion, such as that of Othello and of Coriolanus, and such as Lear’s would be if he were not so old. These affections, passions, and sufferings of free and open natures are Shakespeare’s favourite tragic subject; and his favouritism, surely, goes so far as to constitute a decided peculiarity, not found thus in other tragic poets. Here he painted most, one cannot but think, what his own nature was most inclined to feel. But it would rather be melancholy, embitterment, an inactive rage or misanthropy, than any destructive passion; and it would be a further question whether, and how far, he may at any time have experienced what he depicts. I am speaking here only of his disposition.[9]

That Shakespeare was as much inclined to be a lover as most poets we may perhaps safely assume; but can we conjecture anything further on this subject? I will confine myself to two points. He treats of love romantically, and tragically, and humorously. In the earlier plays especially the humorous aspect of the matter, the aspect so prominent in the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, the changefulness, brevity, irrationality, of the feeling, is at least as much dwelt on as the romantic, and with at least as much relish:

Lord! what fools these mortals be!

Now, if there is anything peculiar in the pictures here, it is, perhaps, the special interest that Shakespeare seems to take in what we may call the unreality of the feeling of love in an imaginative nature. Romeo as he first appears, and, in a later play, Orsino, are examples of this. They are perfectly sincere, of course, but neither of them is really in love with a woman; each is in love with the state of being in love. This state is able to attach itself to a particular object, but it is not induced by the particular qualities of that object; it is more a dream than a passion, and can melt away without carrying any of the lover’s heart with it; and in that sense it is unreal. This weakness, no doubt, is not confined to imaginative natures, but they may well be specially disposed to it (as Shelley was), and Shakespeare may have drawn it from his own experience. The suspicion is strengthened when we think of Richard II. In Richard this imaginative weakness is exhibited again, though not in relation to love. He luxuriates in images of his royal majesty, of the angels who guard his divine right, and of his own pathetic and almost sacred sufferings. The images are not insincere, and yet they are like dreams, for they refuse to touch earth and to connect themselves either with his past misdeeds or with the actions he ought now to perform. A strain of a similar weakness appears again in Hamlet, though only as one strain in a much more deep and complex nature. But this is not a common theme in poetry, much less in dramatic poetry.[10]

To come to our second question. When Shakespeare painted Cressida or described her through the mouth of Ulysses (‘O these encounterers,’ etc.), or, again, when he portrayed the love of Antony for Cleopatra, was he using his personal experience? To answer that he must have done so would be as ridiculous as to argue that Iago must be a portrait of himself; and the two plays contain nothing which, by itself, would justify us even in thinking that he probably did so. But we have the series of sonnets about the dark lady; and if we accept the sonnets to the friend as to some considerable extent based on fact and expressive of personal feelings, how can we refuse to take the others on the same footing? Even if the stories of the two series were not intertwined, we should have no ground for treating the two in different ways, unless we could say that external evidence, or the general impression we derive from Shakespeare’s works, forbids us to believe that he could ever have been entangled in an intrigue like that implied in the second series, or have felt and thought in the manner there portrayed. Being unable to say this, I am compelled, most regretfully, to hold it probable that this series is, in the main, based on personal experience. And I say ‘most regretfully,’ not merely because one would regret to think that Shakespeare was the victim of a Cressida or even the lover of a Cleopatra, but because the story implied in these sonnets is of quite another kind. They leave, on the whole, a very disagreeable impression. We cannot compare it with the impressions produced, for example, by the ‘heathen’ spirit of Goethe’s Roman Elegies, or by the passion of Shakespeare’s Antony. In these two cases, widely dissimilar of course, we may speak of ‘immorality,’ but we are not discomfited, much less disgusted. The feeling and the attitude are poetic, whole-hearted, and in one case passionate in the extreme. But the state of mind expressed in the sonnets about the dark lady is half-hearted, often prosaic, and never worthy of the name of passion. It is uneasy, dissatisfied, distempered, the state of mind of a man who despises his ‘passion’ and its object and himself, but, standing intellectually far above it, still has not resolution to end it, and only pains us by his gross and joyless jests. In Troilus and Cressida—not at all in the portrayal of Troilus’s love, but in the atmosphere of the drama—we seem to trace a similar mood of dissatisfaction, and of intellectual but practically impotent contempt.

In this connection it is natural to think of the ‘unhappy period’ which has so often been surmised in Shakespeare’s life. There is not time here to expand the summary remarks made elsewhere on this subject; but I may refer a little more fully to a persistent impression left on my mind by writings which we have reason to assign to the years 1602-6.[11] There is surely something unusual in their tone regarding certain ‘vices of the blood,’ regarding drunkenness and sexual corruption. It does not lie in Shakespeare’s view of these vices, but in an undertone of disgust. Read Hamlet’s language about the habitual drunkenness of his uncle, or even Cassio’s words about his casual excess; then think of the tone of Henry IV. or Twelfth Night or the Tempest; and ask if the difference is not striking. And if you are inclined to ascribe it wholly to the fact that Hamlet and Othello are tragedies, compare the passages in them with the scene on Pompey’s galley in Antony and Cleopatra. The intent of that scene is terrible enough, but in the tone there is no more trace of disgust than in Twelfth Night. As to the other matter, what I refer to is not the transgression of lovers like Claudio and Juliet, nor even light-hearted irregularities like those of Cassio: here Shakespeare’s speech has its habitual tone. But, when he is dealing with lechery and corruption, the undercurrent of disgust seems to become audible. Is it not true that in the plays from Hamlet to Timon that subject, in one shape or another, is continually before us; that the intensity of loathing in Hamlet’s language about his mother’s lust is unexampled in Shakespeare; that the treatment of the subject in Measure for Measure, though occasionally purely humorous, is on the whole quite unlike the treatment in Henry IV. or even in the brothel scenes of Pericles;[12] that while Troilus and Cressida is full of disgust and contempt, there is not a trace of either in Antony and Cleopatra, though some of the jesting there is obscene enough; that this same tone is as plainly heard in the unquestioned parts of Timon; and that, while it is natural in Timon to inveigh against female lechery when he speaks to Alcibiades and his harlots, there is no apparent reason why Lear in his exalted madness should choose this subject for similar invectives? ‘Pah! give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination’—it is a fainter echo of this exclamation that one seems to hear in the plays of those years. Of course I am not suggesting that it is mainly due, or as regards drunkenness due in the least, to any private experience of Shakespeare’s. It may have no connection whatever with that experience. It might well be connected with it only in so far as a man frequently wearied and depressed might be unusually sensitive to the ugly aspects of life. But, if we do not take the second series of sonnets to be purely fanciful, we shall think it probable that to some undefined extent it owed its origin to the experience depicted in them.[13]